Thursday, March 1, 2012

Hacking NFC

Not strictly speaking hacking the protocol or platform or
whatever you want to call it, because that might require rather more technical
knowledge than I have left and implies something that is probably illegal, but
hacking, in terms of using the near field communication infrastructure to muck
about and produce something akin to a chocolate fireguard that you can show
other people and say ‘look! I did a chocolate fireguard!’, as they add the
finishing touches to their ‘tap-to-space travel’ demo.

Last week, the UK’s first NFC hack event was launched in
Norwich. It’s a pretty ad hoc affair, under the Hot Source banner, that Proxama
are supporting by making their NFC technology platform available to anybody who
wanted to enter a team. All you have to bring to the party is your creative
minds and a willingness to stand in front of the other 17 teams at the end of
the month and show them what you’ve managed to build. And show them you can. With an NFC-enabled phone, access to Proxama’s hardware and software, tags and
tech, you really can build an NFC-enabled technology solution. You just write
that HTML5 stuff that displays a monkey, loyalty card, free gift or whatever,
when your programmed NFC tag is tapped with your phone. Of course, since your
team defines the experience, owns the code, has the idea in the first place,
you can do much more than monkeys. If you want to write a bunch of HTML that’s
loaded in webkit, or the Proxama app, and then have that web content do
something else, like, say, integrate with your ecommerce platform, turn on the
lights, leverage location services on your device and send a message to the queen
specifying exactly where the bloody cake is to be delivered already, then you can do that,
just with a tap of your phone on the programmable tag.

You see what’s possible here? It’s not just about using your
phone to pay for a banana. I mean, the platform could support that if you
wanted to do that, but, like, you can already do that. The idea of the hack
event is that armed with the technology platform, you create something new,
innovative, quite possibly ridiculous, but definitely original and potentially
commercially viable. And, if it is, all well and good. Take that idea away with
you and make it commercially viable. Proxama aren’t going to steal it, it’s your
IP. Do with it what you will. What the event is about is demonstrating what you
can do with the NFC platform. And I’m leading the Flow team. There’s also a
Foolproof team, but, you know, I don’t give them much hope for winning the
competition. I mean, I can’t see how anyone is going to top my shark tank
escape game. It’s simple – you get dropped in a shark tank with your NFC phone
and have to tap on the hidden tags to open the escape hatch. You either tap all
the tags, in the right order, within the time, or, well, the demo gets really
interesting. I haven’t decided which team member is going to demo it yet, mind.